Have the greens failed?

On May 3, 2007, League of Conservation Voters President Gene Karpinski realized that the plan was working.

That morning, Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.), then a presidential contender, attached his name to a model piece of climate legislation that sought to bring U.S. carbon emissions down by an ambitious 80 percent by 2050. Not to be outdone, a few hours later, Sen. Hillary Clinton (D-N.Y.) hastily announced she’d support the same bill.

Story Continued Below

And with that, climate issues seemed — at long last — to have departed the realm of idealism and entered the more fruitful arena of politics, with its results-driven rules of engagement. Environmentalists would no longer have to appeal to politicians’ best instincts by promising they’d be saving future generations and doing the right thing for the globe. Instead, climate activists could draft more-persuasive allies of the electoral variety: fear, ambition and self-preservation.

“It really became a competition. That was the beauty of it,” recalled Karpinski. “This became an issue where they were competing to see who was the best.”

Yet as green activists converge on the 15th United Nations Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen, their sense of disappointment is palpable, even with the eleventh-hour decision by President Obama to attend the summit on Dec. 9. What was seen in the heady days of 2007 and 2008 as the likeliest venue for a new international agreement on carbon emissions now caps a year of mixed results. While the American political system has, in many ways, seen a total transformation in its capacity and willingness to tackle such a transcendent issue, some of the traditional obstacles remain — primarily the age-old laws of partisan politics and the limits on how much ambitious legislation Congress can absorb at one time.

At the apex of the 2008 campaign, with the League and other groups leaning hard on a crowded field of presidential candidates, and congressional Democrats shifting steadily toward the view that action would be required, a Democratic victory seemed likely to mean a treaty in the new president’s first year.

In retrospect, though, what had seemed like a political coup was just a partial victory. The populist organizing, the new rhetoric of green jobs and the long-term goals of the campaign season glossed over the concrete terms that have turned 2009 into a season of diminished expectations, making clear that Copenhagen will be, at best, just another step in a long process. In interviews, environmental leaders made the case that the movement’s successes vastly outweigh the setbacks and that they probably never could have predicted the main obstacle to passing major climate legislation this year.

“When someone asks why aren’t we going to get a deal in Copenhagen, the biggest reason comes down to two words: health care,” said Karpinski.

If the green community is slightly downcast on the eve of Copenhagen, its members still argue that the 12-day conference should set the stage for a major showdown over climate legislation in Congress next year, with victory there being the precursor to a global accord.

“The president is working closely with Congress to pass energy and climate legislation as soon as possible,” the White House said in announcing his trip to the summit. Obama hopes his attendance will “drive progress toward a comprehensive and operational Copenhagen accord” that will “serve as a steppingstone to a legally binding treaty.”